The Moz Blog

Whiteboard Friday - Best Page First?

This week Rand discusses the reasons why the page with the best content isn't always the one with the best rankings. Many factors can contribute, but finding a way to work with the idiosyncrasies of the engines can often be the key to getting your niche content highly ranked. ...

Why Testing is Integral to Modern SEO

So I recently turned 25 and figured that officially makes me old enough to write a 'how things were' post...

The Benefits And Pitfalls of URL Shorteners

TinyURL QurlyQ MemURL dwarfURL doiop Kurl.us dn.vc SnipURL ix.lt metamark.net TinyURL shorl.com w3t.org xaddr.com si9.org urlTea.com icanhaz.com turo.us rubyurl.com rurl.us RlinkR.com urlx.org is.gd tnij.org abbrr.com...

Comparative Advertising: Can I Talk About My Competitor On My Website?

May It Please the Mozzers, I am often asked, "Can I talk about my competitor on my website?" To answer this question, I thought I would do a quick post about comparative advertising. The Federal Trade Commission promotes lawful comparative advertising as a great way to inform consumers and increase competition. Describing how your pro...

Link Building Notes of an SEO Kindergartner

Sharing is good in kindergarten and in SEO. ...

Snake Oil In Disguise: Useless Information Passing As Good Advice

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Holy Sh*t, I Joined Twitter

Sigh. After much badgering, cajoling, nudging, and subtle threatening from my coworkers, colleagues, friends, and Jane (yes, Jane gets her own category--she badgered me a lot), I finally joined the Twitter. Much like Jane did when she begrudgingly joined, I'll take you through the terrifying process of nervously dipping a toe i...

SEOmoz Expert Training: Global Search

On day 1 of SEOmoz' expert training last week, Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris of Distilled asked a bit of a trick question: what is the 2nd most popular search engine in the UK? The answer: google.com. The first most popular being of course google.co.uk.The barrier they broke down here is that ...

Why Reputable SEO Firms Don't Promise Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings

Tonight, I received an email with a familiar question, asking why the top companies providing SEO consulting and development services rarely ever provide guarantees (and virtually never use it as a marketing tactic). To this, there are three solid reasons that compel SEOmoz internally as well as the many companies we work with/...

Another Look at Meta Geo

Some months ago there was a little discussion about meta geo tags following one of Rand's Whiteboard Friday presentations. It seemed like the tags were dismissed as being open to exploitation and probably ignored by the search engines. Lately, though, we've been having a lot of success with helping our smal...

A Reputation 2.0 Problem - Wiki-Circularity

What with it being Labor day in the US yesterday, it should have fallen on the trusty global associates to put together something for the SEOmoz blog. Unfortunately we were working instead :( Waiting for the bus in the rain this morning was a fairly miserable start to the day, but what if it had started worse? What if I had woken up this morning to find bad things written about me or my company on the internet?

The X-Files of Google: 10 Inexplicably Weird Search Results

Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don't make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin'-scratchers just keep on itchin'. I've collected these ten over the past couple months and figured I'd share them on the blog with the hopes of g...